


In the Aftermath

by lexicale



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-29
Updated: 2012-09-29
Packaged: 2017-11-15 06:08:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lexicale/pseuds/lexicale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ruby made two promises and only one was a lie. But trying to hold Sam together in the wake of his brother's death is so much harder than she ever thought. Sam feels so much and she has lost that human vocabulary. The summer after Dean is dragged to Hell, Ruby struggles to relearn it and Sam struggles just to breathe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Semi-graphic sex, some violence
> 
> Based off of [this](http://pics.livejournal.com/vail_kagami/pic/00136efp) beautiful artwork prompt. Please visit [here](http://vail-kagami.livejournal.com/157967.html#cutid1) to see all of vail-kagami's artwork for this story.

Sam Winchester is by no means small.

Ruby knows from pictures and from stories mumbled into her shoulder that he wasn’t always so tall though. That, in fact, he was a late bloomer. On some undocumented night in eastern Arizona, in some motel with no AC and the air thick and stifling, he told her about being short at sixteen, teased by his brother and frowned at by his father, convinced he was the only one to miss the Winchester tall gene.

He hadn’t, of course.

The year after that he’d finally grown, reached 5’10 and thought that was it. The boy hadn’t finished growing until he was nineteen, a stretched out bean pole of a man, all that energy and potential saved up for years.

He’s filled out since then, grown muscles from running and fighting and killing, grown strong from hunting things that man fears to look at, and these days most people clear out of his way, like he’s this thing to be avoided, to be given space and deference.

Sam doesn’t do well with things like that.

She’s known the kid for all of a year and most of that hadn’t been on the best of terms, but she’s had a lot of time in Hell to learn how to read people, to learn how to understand them, and she knows Sam. If she knows anyone at all, she knows Sam, and he just wants to vanish into the crowd.

No special treatment, no careful space -- no sign that he could be different at all.

She thinks, if he could, Sam would tuck himself away from the world, set himself up in a corner with some books and pray for silence. Pray for peace. And he wouldn’t mind at all if everything passed him by. He’s the only man Ruby’s ever met, in all her years, that truly has no care for power, for greatness. He doesn’t need to be remembered or renowned, doesn’t need to be a man of great significance, and she’s seen so many sell their souls for it.

No. Sam just wants his brother back.

And it’s pretty much the only thing she can’t do for him.

Two months ago, back in May, in some pointless suburb of human monotony, Dean had died. He’d died and been dragged to Hell for his trouble. Ruby had never thought that it would end any other way, but it still tore Sam down and that had hurt to watch. When she’d promised Sam that she could save Dean she’d been lying. She knew there was nothing to be done. She’d told Dean as much. You make a deal with the devil and there’s really only one way that ends -- Ruby remembers it well. She made a deal herself of course, like every demon. Like every black tarnished soul that carried all the sin of Hell with them.

And with that kind of crap weighing her down, one more little lie had seemed like nothing at all.

“Do you sleep?” Sam murmurs, her head pillowed against his chest. She hears his heart beating, his blood pumping, his lungs stretching -- the sounds of a body in the eternal motion of life. She hasn’t felt anything like that in five hundred years, not truly. She misses the synthetic comfort of wearing a living host, of feeling it vicariously. She misses the way she could trick herself into feeling alive, but Sam had been right. Sam is usually right.

She’s in a dead host now, soulless save for her, but she hadn’t even thought of why it would be wrong to possess someone, not until Sam told her. It’s why she needs him. Hell beat the moral center out of her -- left the memories, left all the recollections of a human life and a human heart and all the good and intended reasons that she ended up at that crossroads, but not the feelings. She doesn’t feel her humanity, she only remembers it.

The best she can do now is trust in Sam, listen to Sam. Lean on him to guide her.

And his first declaration had been to get a meatsuit that lacked a soul.

“No,” she replies to his question. “Not really.” She can turn her consciousness off, so long as she’s possessing someone, but it isn’t the same kind of thing. She never feels the rejuvenation of sleep, can never escape the perpetual _tired_ of the damned. Her essence, her being, is a wreck of sin and darkness. Besides, turning off like that is a danger now -- she has a job to do, and playing protector to the Boy King requires a kind of vigilance that few things do.

“Then why do you stay in bed all night?” Sam rolls his head towards her, looking down at her. She can see perfectly, despite the dark -- can make out his features, that same old curiosity, that need to know. It’s muted now, though, as if he can’t really bring himself to care like he once had. She’d never known him _before,_ before the deal, before the countdown. She’d never known the Sam that Dean knew, but she could imagine. And even she knew that as messed up as must have been, even then, it had still been better than now.

“Why not?” She shrugs her petite shoulders, sitting up slightly, laying on her belly with her arms folded over Sam’s chest. She looks down at him. “Better than sitting in the corner and watching you sleep like a creeper.”

“There’s really nothing better for you to do?”

“There really isn’t.”

His eyebrows go up, as if he really finds that surprising, and she’s always thrown by how little Sam thought of himself. To her it’s obvious. _Visible._ He is the Boy King. He is the savior of her kind. Her only true salvation. He is a human boy with the world in his hands and he still hasn’t quite made up his mind what to do with it -- and until he does, she’s meant to be there to keep him safe.

She can’t imagine what else he thinks she could be doing -- what would be more important than that.

“Sam,” she chides. “Just go to sleep.”

“I don’t get it, Ruby.”

“I’m five hundred years older than you -- there’s a lot of stuff you’re not going to get.” She reaches up, slender fingers playing with the whorls of hair that curl and fall in his eyes, a mess of chestnut, so soft to the touch. “...you need to sleep.”

“Not tired.” His eyes dart off to the side, looking in a direction without purpose, staring into the empty spaces of the room as if he means to, as if he sees something there beyond the hollow shadows.

He’s never tired these days, but he’s still exhausted.

Ruby shifts her stolen body, pushing it up from the bed. The sheets fall away, revealing skin, and she slings a leg over his waist. She wonders what he’d think if he could see her, the _real_ her -- the woman who’d lived and died half a millenia ago. Ruby doesn’t remember her name then, or her face, but she remembers her hair: orange red and a mess of curls. She remembers how proud she was of it as a girl, remembers how the boys of her village used to stare at her. It was the first thing the demons went for, when she fell to Hell, ripping it from her scalp, ripping down to her skull.

It was the first thing they took from her, but hardly the last. She doesn’t have the ability to regret, anymore.

Sam’s hands come to her waist instantly, his expression guarded. He’s let her into his bed, but not into his trust -- strange for a man like him. It only serves to prove how much he’s missing these days, as if an essential piece, some essential _Sam_ piece was torn away and taken to Hell with Dean. 

She puts a hand against his sternum.

“I could make you tired,” she flirts, sultry and low. He winces, looking less turned on and more uncomfortable. He’s a puzzle of a man, one that doesn’t make sense to Ruby. She’s known the heart of men for too long, known it intimately in all its twists and turns, all its aspirations and needy grasping. She knows how all men hunger, how all men feed the darkness, but Sam Winchester is nothing like the rest. It only makes her want him more, when there has been so little she’s wanted these past few hundred years.

He makes her wonder and that alone is rare.

Her hands creep up his arms, feeling the long line of smooth skin, wrapped and tight over muscle won not through workouts or gym memberships but instead through hard runs and fighting for his life. Muscle and power won through animal victory, hard and harsh and violent. It’s amazing how gentle he is in the face of that.

She pins his wrists above his head, half his size and tiny but still stronger -- demonically strong, and when he shifts his bones grate long before her grip wavers.

“Ruby--” he starts, looking up at her. She waits for it, waits for the flash of fear, the innate desire to protect oneself, but it’s not there and that makes her frown. She needs him to want to live.

“...You want me to let go?” she asks, prepared to do so. She doesn’t really know what it’s like to not want to hurt people anymore. Like all demons she runs on pain and rage, built from mindless destruction without the capacity to love, but Sam--... Sam is something different. She would only hurt him if he asked for it.

There’s a pause before he shakes his head, giving her silent permission, and she leans down to kiss his neck, lips against his flesh and his hunter’s body restrained. He doesn’t buck against her, just lifts his chin, offers himself up and it makes the heart she doesn’t have twinge. She needs him. Needs his soul, his guidance. She needs him to show her the way -- because she can see through the dark but not through anything deeper. She can hold him down, but only he can lift her up.

And tonight, at least, the sex isn’t rough. 

She holds him in place, rides him steadily and listens to his breath hitch. She doesn’t know how to take care of him, not like Dean did, but she tries in her own way. She takes him into her body and controls him, gives him release from his responsibilities, his self-imposed prison of words and laws and lets him obey her instead. He moans so sweet, so beautiful underneath her, shakes when she grasps him, and she watches his hair fall around his face, sticking to the sweat of his skin on his temples and cheeks. She watches that body -- so large and so strong -- go weak beneath her strength. She has to be careful, has to remind herself over and over not to grasp too tight. Not to break him, as she so easily could.

It’s been decades since anyone made her almost lose control.

When he comes inside her dead body his back arches and she supports him, hand beneath him and voice hushing sounds in his ear. In the wake of their coupling he begins to go limp, to finally let even an inch of that tension leak from him, and he breathes out in a way she never will, arms still over his head and his eyes pressing shut. She moves one hand to run up and down his chest and stomach, trying to ease him, but all she gets for her troubles is a protracted sob, inchoate grief unwilling to leave him.

She slips off of his body and lays beside him in the bed, listening as the summer storm rages outside. A demon tries to hold on to a human, tries to keep him there with her, but she’s lost in the sea of his emotion, the reality of him too far deep for her to swim, and all she can do is grip his shoulders and hope that she is better than nothing.

He is the only thing in the world that makes her feel real again.

A week and a half later, at the end of June and deep in the sweet heat of Texas, Sam goes missing.

\-----

It had taken Ruby nearly two weeks to get back to Sam, after his brother’s death -- after Lilith ousted her from her host and sent her wandering again. Finding a host, grounding them, wasn’t as easy as one-two-three, especially when the first demon in the world sends you battered and bruised. Ruby had holed up, licked her wounds.

She should have known that Sam would be falling apart, but it was hard for a demon to look past their own pain. She’d been hurting and she needed time, so she took it.

When she finally got to her ward she found him a broken figure of the man he once was, and since then she’s tried to stay near, to hold him together as best she can -- but she can’t be there all the time. Lilith is on some hell-bent crusade to end the world, and that’s not magically gonna stop itself. Sam is too wrapped up in the impossible task of getting his lost brother back to see what’s going on around him so it falls instead to Ruby.

She’s not used to playing the good guy, barely knows how, but she does her best. She still lies and cheats and steals, she still murders and lays waste, but now she does it in the name of saving the world.

But at the end of one of her sojourns away, she returns to find Sam gone -- buckshot in the walls and blood on the carpet. She should feel frustrated. She should feel exasperated and put out, inconvenienced. Instead she feels _fury_ , white hot anger licking at the walls of her abode.

Sam is _hers_ now, all hers and no one else’s and they’ve taken him from her.

She hasn’t felt possessive in centuries. In Hell, nothing is belongs to you, not your soul, not the body they invent for you, not you morals or your thoughts or your consciousness. It all belongs to them. Ruby remembers the feeling of propriety -- remembers the way she assumed ownership of herself and her actions -- but Hell bled that dry a long time ago. Now she is a rudderless creature, based only in self-interest, but this, _Sam,_ is special. Something outside of her definitions.

He is _her_ human and they _took_ him from her.

She leaves the room a smoldering wreck of rage and ashes, wood torn apart as if by a storm and she flies up into the clouds like a vengeful spirit, the ripple of her dark countenance shuddering through the moonless sky. She doesn’t know where Sam is, but she knows how to find him. She was a witch in life, after all -- and she may not remember her name, but she remembers the feel of magic. It comes easier to her now, when she is this: a creature built from sin and shadow, a creature beyond the grasp of mere mortality.

There is no veil to pierce. She already lives on the other side.

At first she thinks it was other demons and just the thought makes her screech like a banshee, her choler echoing through the clouds like lightning. But distantly she remembers the buckshot, the crack of a door kicked down, and both of those _could_ be done by a demon, but there was no otherworldly presence there save her own, and no smell of sulfur. The last of her doubts are brushed away when she can pick out the prickling of Sam’s divine blood, can taste it through the atmosphere, and no demon would leave him undisguised. Once, years ago, Sam could hide amongst the masses, but his birth right is flowering, growing, and now he could never be mistaken for anything but what he is: the Messiah of their kind. 

If he’d been taken by demons, Ruby doubts she would have the power to find him, low on the totem pole as she is.

Instead it’s simple -- not twenty miles out from the motel room left in shambles there is a shack, the pale remains of what must have once been a home, a place where children lived. Now it is boards and broken glass, the light glowing out of it wan and trembling and Ruby lands and reforms her dead host’s form on the solid, wet earth. Her feet are spread and braced, muscles tense and she curls her tiny hands into fists.

Inside of the shack there is the low rumble of voices, sounds indistinct but male, the gravelly click of their voices more like a murmur than anything else. She takes a few strides forward only to hit a wall in front of the porch steps, stumbling back. She growls under her breath: hunters.

Now, at least, she knows what she’s up against.

Hunters never expect a demon to think and she understands why. Before now, before _this,_ this cataclysmic event, his apocalyptic era, the only demons that came topside where mindless: mad with pain and anger and seeking only destruction, no rhyme or reason to it. Hunters still expect demons to act like that, expect the simplicity of a spirit gone black and insane, but these days are not the same as the past and the demons that walk the earth now are a different breed.

They are demons like Lilith, who has _goals,_ demons like Azazel, who had devotion. They are demons who can plan and wait, demons who hold within them machinations. And they are demons like Ruby, who knows how to use a goddamned trowel.

She finds one out by what used to be the gardening shed, twirling the metal in her palm as she walks back to where the salt line is buried. She can’t cross salt and can’t touch it, but that doesn’t mean she can’t _move_ it and she digs down, dumping earth and salt into a pile next to her. Once or twice a few grains sprinkle against her skin and she feels them -- not on the flesh but deeper than that, feels it on her _soul_ and the pain is nothing like what humans think pain is. Even so, Ruby has five hundred years of existential torture under her belt, both dishing it out and taking it, and she swallows down any sounds with grit teeth, digging until there is a deep gash in the earth where there was once soil and the boundary is broken. Only three inches missing from what has to be an eighty foot perimeter, but that’s all that’s necessary.

The power of the salt is in the circle.

She steps over the line, dropping the trowel on the ground, its usefulness outlived, and strides up the steps onto the front porch. The wood is old and warped, creaky, but she’s careful, steps lightly, and the noise is minimal. She hears the crack of fresh striking flesh and pauses. The voices raise and she hears one, clearer now.

“Answer me! Answer me, you little bastard.” There’s the scuffle of shoes on boards and Ruby makes her way cautiously to a window. It never pays to go in blind and Ruby is no powerful demon -- she’s survived the centuries she has through cunning, not brawn.

The glass is thin and broken in places, letting the sound carry unhampered and Ruby edges up to the sill. It’s light inside and dark out, masking her presence but she tries to minimize her form anyways, peering through the window. Inside the room there are three men, two of them tall and all of them broad with muscle, dressed in the raggedy wear of hunters. There’s a gas lamp on a rickety old table and another one up on the mantle over the fireplace. The room is mostly barren, dirty with soot, decay and years of abandonment and in the back is Sam.

He’s sitting on a haggard chair, his head hung and long hair dangling down so that she can’t see his eyes. His hands aren’t visible, tied behind him most likely, and he’s leaned forward, his weight resting against them. She can see spots of blood on his torn clothing but nothing major, nothing debilitating. Still, she won’t know for sure -- not until she has him under her hands again.

One of the men strides forward, grabbing Sam’s chin and yanking it up. The man has a rifle strapped over his shoulder and Ruby tenses, though he doesn’t appear to be preparing to use it.

“We can keep you hear a long time, boy,” the man says, the threat in his voice simple and bare. Spartan. “No one’s gonna be looking for you now.”

Ruby doesn’t see much but she can see the way Sam just barely flinches. His father’s dead. His brother’s dead. He has no family anymore and the hunters know it. There’s nothing to protect him.

Well.

Nothing but her.

Sam says nothing.

“You’re a monster, you know that?” another hunter asks, further away from Sam and closer to Ruby, leaned back against the table. “Your dad was a son of a bitch, but he knew right from wrong. He was a hunter. He fought back the night like the rest of us and how do you repay him? By slinking off to join in with all the things that want us dead.”

They’re wrong, of course, but Sam’s not going to correct them. Sam is good. She knows very little these days but she knows that. Sam is good and she must listen to him. He is the guide and she the follower. He is the light that was given to her to guard and protect.

He is the sacred. She is the profane.

Sam is no monster but if it’s a monster they want, she can show them one.

In the shack they drag Sam up off of the chair, one of them moving behind him and fiddling with whatever’s binding his hands. She sees after a moment that it’s handcuffs-- No, manacles. Not old or rusty. They’re new, made from thick shiny metal and she’s confused until she puts the pieces together. They think that runes, Devil’s traps, will bind Sam’s power, will bind _Sam._ Handcuffs won’t do, too weak and not enough surface area to mark sigils into, but she’s sure that the underside of the manacles bear the marks of man. They are marks that would bind her, bind her brethren, but Sam is at once too human and too inhuman to be effected by such things.

All the same, the hunters undo one of the cuffs, moving Sam’s hands in front of him and locking it shut again, such that both arms hang before him instead of behind. The tallest one, still a couple of inches shorter than Sam, stretches her human’s arms up above his head, hooking the chain links of the manacles over the hook of the old chandelier, rusty and wretched but apparently still strong enough to take Sam’s weight.

He doesn’t fight back. It’s not in his nature. 

At once her heart both aches and furies, touched by his sweetness, his tenderness, wanting to protect it, and at the same time wanting to kick him, slap him, make him wake up and see there’s no evil in self-defense. But then again, what does she know? She’s sworn to follow him, to let him guide her. He’s the one with a conscience. She is only the disciple.

At the moment, however, he’s chained to lamp in a broken down old shack with buckshot in his hide and bruises over his skin. He can’t give her directions. She’ll have to wing it. Once she gets him out, then she can figure out the right and the wrong -- she refuses to leave him here.

“Tell us what their plan is,” the shorter hunter demands, meaty hand coming up to grasp Sam’s chin, holding his face still. “Do some good for your kind, boy. Honor your daddy’s name and tell us what’s comin’ down the line.”

“I don’t know,” Sam answers and it’s the wrong answer, even if it is true. Shorty cuffs Sam hard across the side of his head, hard enough to make his ears ring, Ruby’s sure, and she slips to the other side of the window, her back to the wall. She reaches down into her coat. She doesn’t have a gun but she has her knife and it’s good for more than killing demons.

Sam doesn’t make a sound, not a peep, despite the way he winces and bares his teeth in a grimace. He doesn’t make a sound until Shorty grabs the amulet around his neck and _yanks,_ throwing it down on the bare, dirty floor. It’s only then that Sam cries out, hurt and bereft.

“Don’t act coy,” the man snarls, face twisted up as he stares at Sam. “You turned traitor, betrayed your whole _world_ and for what? What did they promise you?”

“Nothing,” Sam breathes out, shaking his head, but his eyes are fixed on the amulet laying on the floor.

“What did they give you?”

“Nothing!”

The hunter leaned up against the table pushes himself upright, lifting a hand to pull the cigarette from between his lips. His face is blank, stoic, and he’s the one Ruby knows is dangerous. He’s the one who’s doing this for more than just the hunt, for more than just fighting back the night -- he enjoys it. Ruby knows the other humans can’t see. They only see a comrade, their brother in arms, but Ruby’s been stripped of skin more than enough times to know the ones that like it, and he’s the one she doesn’t want near Sam.

Her worries are confirmed when the man yanks Sam’s shirt back, putting out the cigarette on his collar bone, right where the flesh is thinnest and Sam gasps, grits his teeth and arches his head back, leaving bare the long trail of his neck -- Ruby can only just make out the mark she left there three days ago. That realization, the idea of this man, this _stranger’s_ mark on Sam’s skin and not hers hits her wild, sets her dead bones on edge and that is _it._

One hand presses to the window sill and she throws herself through the glass, hearing it shatter around her as she enters the room, cuts healing even as they form. In her other hand is the knife and she brings it to bear, feet hitting the ground as the hunters whirl to face her, guns coming up in a heartbeat. They’re not expecting her though, still have the guns loaded from capturing Sam, and she feels the plain lead and buckshot ricochet through her, doing little more than damage to an already worn out body and leaving Ruby unharmed. The momentum, though -- that’s a bitch.

It takes her an extra couple of seconds to reach Shorty, hand coming up to slam the butt of the dagger against the meaty part of his temple. She hears the sound of him crying out half a second after the sound of bone snapping and grating. Another bullet hits her in the side, sliding slick into her belly and Shorty is already falling to the side as she brings her hand up, the otherworldly edge of her knife slicing open the tall one’s thigh, blood splattering the floor as he lets out a strangled call, hands gripping the gaping flesh as he hits the ground, gun discarded. 

She turns to get the last one, the one that liked it, the bastard, but instead turns to look straight into the barrel of his gun. He fires and the sound of the gunpowder igniting blends with the sound of the bullet cracking her skull, sinking into the useless grey matter drying out inside. Her head snaps back, feels the force of it almost pull her off of her feet, but it’s no sanctified bullet, bears no sacred mark. It is just iron, cold and useless, and her chin jerks back down again. She smiles when she sees the look of shock, the brief flicker of it registering across his features before her knife is driven up through his gullet, straight through the underside of his jaw. It pierces his mouth, his tongue and soft palette, up through his nasal cavity and into his brain. His makes a noise, a gargling, rattling moan, and his eyes focus on her for only half a heartbeat before they roll back in his head. 

She yanks the knife out and he crumples to the ground like a doll.

When she looks up she finds Sam’s tired grey eyes staring at her, watching her. His gaze is the only one that makes her feel uncomfortable anymore. He is the only one who bothers to ever look into her.

She turns away, half to avoid it and half to finish her business -- ending these interlopers, these morons that would dare to take Sam from her -- but she’s stilled by his voice.

“Don’t,” he says, quicks and cutting into her motion. She glances back at him and he shakes his head, trying to shift his weight up to get his arms down, but the chandelier just swings with him, his effort in vain. 

“Why not?” she asks. After a pause she grabs the chair that Sam had been sitting in before. She drags it over in front of him, climbing up to deal with the issue.

“Because you can’t kill them. No killing humans, remember?” He grunts when she manages to get him unhooked, lifting the weight of his wrists as she steadies the metal of the light. He lowers his arms, rubbing at his wrists, the manacles dropping down to his forearms. He doesn’t pause for even a second before he’s going to the floor, sweeping the amulet up and into his palm, grasping it greedily and clasping it to his chest.

“I remember,” she replies, watching him. “There’s not like...an exception? A clause for assholes that kidnap you in the middle of the night?” She raises an eyebrow, skeptical as she crosses her arms over her chest.

“No.” His answer is quick. Clean. It takes him a moment, though, to look up from the necklace cupped in his hands. “In the heat of things...” He glanced over at the bastard, body still twitching a little, laying in a pool of slowly expanding blood. “In the heat of things, that’s one thing.” Sam shakes his head. “Killing defenseless people is another. You can’t do that, Ruby.”

She could kill Sam. She knows that.

She looks at him there, weak and human and rubbing his skin and if she thrust the knife in now it would kill him just as well as it would kill any human, as well as it would kill any human that ever told her what she could and could not do. She’s perfectly aware that she doesn’t have to listen to him. He is greater than her, eternal, but she is stronger. She would win.

But she is leashed to him by choice, not by force. She chose to follow him, to listen, and so even though she doesn’t want to, even though every dark and demonic part of her is screaming for blood, for more violence, she cleans the knife off on her shirt and tucks it back into the sheath that hangs from her belt. She’s not sure if he’s a fool or if she’s a fool following a fool but she made her choice. She’ll stick with it.

She’ll stick with Sam.

“C’mon, Funshine Bear... Let’s get out of here.” She puts an arm around his waist, preternatural strength bearing him up as they hobble out of the shack and down the rickety wooden steps. He grunts occasionally, his only form of protest as they make their way to her car. They find one of the hunters cars, a long walk down the gravel drive but Sam soldiers through, a man used to pain.

By the time she deposits him in the passenger’s seat, she’s completely forgotten about the key to the manacles.

\-----

They return to the motel only to change cars, leaving the hunter’s pick-up parked unevenly across two spaces. Ruby drives them through most of the night, not needing sleep, leaned back against the Impala’s front bench. Sam dozes with his head crooked up against the window, a position of familiarity, sleeping through all the bumps and potholes, a body attuned to the road and at home in this rebuilt old car. Still, two hours before dawn she pulls off and into the parking lot of some motel out in the middle of nowhere.

They’re in the desert, nothing for miles but scrub brush and cactus, the land flat and parched, cracked and hard. There’s only three other cars at the motel and one belongs to the desk clerk. Ruby goes to get them a room and Sam sits in the car, staring straight ahead with tired eyes. When she gets a key, plastic room number tag hanging from the ring, she goes to get him, helping him up and over to the door. Once he’s settled on the edge of a bed and goes back out to the car, digging around in the trunk until she finds the beat up old first aid kit. The metal of the box is dinged and warped, the lid clipped closed and thin handle on the top looking like it’s one stress away from snapping. She brings it in with her and locks the door behind them, throwing the deadbolt and french lock before salting the doorway. It won’t keep out much, but she’ll take what she can get.

When she turns around she pauses, Sam still seated on the edge of the bed and motionless save for breath, those broad shoulders slumped forward, neck bent. Between his knees his hands dangle, the manacles hanging around his wrists. Even though they couldn’t have been on for long there’s some marks. She frowns, setting the first aid box down on the bedside and flicks out her knife, flecks of blood from the man she killed still lingering on the serrated edge.

Sam looks up but doesn’t flinch away when she comes close, doesn’t fight her for the knife and that’s dangerous. He shouldn’t trust a demon like this.

The thought makes her angry and a frown mars her features.

She reaches out, grabbing a fistful of his shirt, lifting it enough to get the knife under the sleeves, cutting the materiel from where it’s rolled up near his elbows up to his shoulder. She doesn’t bother with unbuttoning it, just cuts the damned thing off. She’ll have to find some serious bolt cutters for the manacles. Normal handcuffs she’d just break with her hands. The sigils may not effect Sam but they effect her. She’s able to touch the external, unmarked metal, but her strength will have no effect on them.

She tosses the shirt to the ground, depositing the knife on the bedside before opening the kit. She pulls out some tweezers, looking back at the buckshot in his shoulder. She remembers blood on her hands as a human, remembers hazily the medicines and herbs she mixed, the children she delivered. She remembers burning shut the wound of a man who’d run himself through with his own scythe, but she remembers more clearly the runny blood of Hell. 

She was inured to the workings of the human body long before she became a demon and she sets to work pulling out each black pellet, hearing them ding when she drops them in the open lid of the kit. Sam winces, hisses, every so often, but other than that he does nothing. She can see the amulet hanging from his fingers, sees the way they flex, knuckles tensing, but he doesn’t say anything. He was already just barely dragging himself by, every day, every night without his brother a half living thing, a life defined only by heartbeat and breath and nothing else.

Ruby knows how to revive a heart, knows how to give back breath. A body she can keep running. But the soul she has no idea how to attend and grief is something she lost centuries ago. Grief is something too human for her to truly grasp, but she remembers just enough of it to wish that she could feel it again.

When she’s done she gets up, moves to grab the antibiotic ointment and bandages to finish cleaning his bruised and burned body, but his hands come up, one grabbing her wrist and he stills her.

His touch should be hard. It should burn. It should be rough fingers braced against a small wrist, should be skin scalding skin and dragging her down. It should be filled with all the violence that was the violence done to him, but instead it is slight. It is the gentle clasp of something broken, someone tender, and she watches his throat work with all the life that fled her five hundred years ago. For all her troubles, all her gifts and all the lives she saved, she was burned long before her deal came due. She knows rage and vengeance. Some days it’s all she knows.

She sees none of it in Sam’s eyes.

Sam, who asked for her to spare the lives of his captors.

Ruby knows the hearts of men. They barely need Hell to become devils and the cruelty and destruction they wreak comes naturally. Hell bleeds but the Earth trembles and it isn’t the angels or the demons that tip the scale. It is man and all his hunger for power, all his wrath and his ego.

Ruby knows the hearts of men but Sam remains a mystery. He is in turns powerful and weak, willful and broken, tainted and pure. He is too many things at once, but the one that remains, the one that burns at the heart of him, is that he is good. He is the last good thing on this earth and Ruby doesn’t know how to handle him, doesn’t know how to gentle him like Dean once did, before Dean gave up everything.

Looking down at the breadth of the hand against her, Ruby thinks she would give up everything too. Even with the full knowledge of Hell, the scar of a deal against her soul, Ruby would sell herself again for Sam if she but had anything to sell.

But she doesn’t. And there’s no other way to get Dean back.

And getting Dean back is all Sam really wants.

She abandons the first aid kit, moving towards him. He’s looking for comfort that she doesn’t know how to give, but she’ll try. For him, she’ll try. Just as she tries to be better, tries to follow, tries not to kill or torture, she’ll try this too. She pushes him back against the mattress, his bound hands caught over his middle and he looks up at her, human and so damned fragile. She crawls over him, fingers brushing the bruises and the blood left on him, the marks of man’s hatred of the unknown, marks of the danger of being a freak. She traces them for awhile and he’s quiet, breath hitching only when she trips over a rib -- for a moment she things that maybe it’s broken and glances up.

“Ticklish,” he says with a faint smile. It’s hollow but there. Ruby reaches up to trace that too.

“They were wrong,” she says. “You know they were wrong.”

“They weren’t.” He sounds hollowed out, voice accepting but despairing. He turns his head to the side, looking away. “I have demon blood in me.”

The admission is quieter and makes her brow furrow. She doesn’t know what the great plan is, what Azazel was doing, what Lilith is trying for now, but she knows Sam is important. Is the key. The demon blood is just another clue and one she’ll look into later. Now, though, she reaches out, grasping his chin and pulling his eyes back to her.

“I have demon blood in me too,” she replies, smirk curling at one edge of her lips. Sam laughs, a huff of surprise. “You told me once that it didn’t matter what I was. That it mattered what I did.”

“Yeah, but--”

“But nothing. Either it’s true or it’s not,” she says, sounding more certain than she feels. It was the night they first slept together, the first night in a long time that she’d felt something almost like hope and the night she’d decided to follow Sam no matter what. He had told her that it didn’t matter that she was a demon, that she was some creature loaded down with sin and marked by it. He had been the one to tell her that she could still break free.

And the way he looked at her, the way he believed in her, believed that she could be something better, had earned him her loyalty. A pledge she would never break.

And she didn’t want him to take it back now.

“Either it’s true or it’s not, Sam. Which is it?” She doesn’t tremble, gives nothing away, but she’s scared, for a heartbeat, that he’ll take it back. That he’ll let her fall. She hasn’t felt fear in a long time. Fear is too human -- fear requires hope. It’s all something she thought was beyond her when she clawed her way back up to the cold, dewy earth, seeking only the most meager freedom.

Sam makes her think, sometimes, that something more is out there waiting.

He stares up at her, eyes hooded, expression guarded. He looks like he just got beat to hell, yes, but it’s more than that. It’s like he’s fading away, like there’s less of him every day, and Ruby’s fingers sink into his supple skin, as if she can hold on to something that ephemeral, as if she can pin him down and keep him here. Her nature as a demon is inherently selfish, inherently consuming, and she wants. She wants this.

She leans down, taking his face in her hands and holding him there. His throat is long and his body broad, scarred from a lifetime of fighting, a lifetime of hardship and struggle. He is a warrior, a man raised under the the shadow of a sword but he submits to her so beautifully. She pushes his bound hands, still holding the loops of the amulet, pushes them back over his head, pinning them to the mattress and he gives -- gives in, all too easily. 

She wraps her free hand around that throat, so slender, so tender, and her fingers feel the rasp of his breath, the beat of his pulse. She applies no pressure, makes no force. She merely holds his life in her hands and watches him let her.

Her eyes track down and she frowns when she sees the cigarette mark.

It will heal, she knows, but she still hates its presence -- the mark of someone who had no right to touch Sam, to touch his body. The mark of man upon the skin of a miracle. If she could she would wipe it away, heal it with a touch, but her powers run not towards creation but only towards destruction. Instead her hand moves down, thumb touching the line of his collar bone, feeling it under the thin pretense of skin, until it comes to the blackened mark. It is raised and chipping, skin flaking away and leaving hardened bumps of dried blood and char. She can only hope it won’t leave a scar.

She kisses his jaw, demands his attention with teeth scoring lightly over skin and she feels his body tense to push up, to push into her, but he’s still restrained. He doesn’t fight against her hold -- it would be worthless anyways. Her strength is far beyond his, but it means something to her that he trusts her with this. That a hunter could go weak and vulnerable beneath the weight of a demon. She’s a monster, but he doesn’t judge her for that.

Or perhaps he only thinks that he is one too. The thought hurts for more reasons than Ruby wants to look at.

She releases him only to shed her clothes, watching him clumsily crawl back on the bed, twisting himself to lay the right way and her index fingers hook into her boots, pushing them off. She throws her clothing to the side, hearing it land against the floor. Her body is naked and without scars but most of all it is not hers. She wishes she remembered her face. She wishes she knew if he’d love that face.

She wishes she could know if he would ever love her as much as he loved _him._ Or even if Sam would ever be himself again.

Instead she crawls up after him, straddling his waist, hand coming down to his cheek, touching the cool flesh. He looks like something frozen, bathed in the blue light of the neon sign outside. Her thumb touches his lips and she bites her own.

“...thank you,” he murmurs and she frowns.

“For what?”

“For coming. For saving me.” The way he says it, as if it was surprising, as if he hadn’t _expected_ her to come, sits jagged and thorny inside of her chest. Ruby scowls, reaching down to touch the manacles.

“You’re an idiot,” is all she says and covers his mouth with her hand.

They come together like they always do: in a fit of desperation, two animal bodies moving together, each of them trying to find the light and life in one another. Ruby doesn’t know how to be anything else and Sam is forgetting, losing himself bit by bit with every day that Dean is in Hell and Ruby’s just trying to hold him together as well as she can. Her hands are messy and untrained with the task.

Dean grew up holding things together.

She holds Sam down and takes him in her mouth, hears his breath catch and a groan in his throat, feels his body rise and jerk and his muscles flinch. He’s hard despite whatever pain he’s in, but she’s not surprised. He’s been hunting most of his life -- he’s used to pain. Lives with it. He feels good under her. He feels like the light at the end of the tunnel. He feels like the light she’s searched for.

She works him slowly, far too slowly to get off, slithers up him when she’s done playing and raises her hips over him. Ruby looks down, seeing him twisted, seeing the smudges under his eyes in the wan dim light of the pre-dawn desert morning. She sees the defeat there, hedging in around the edges. She’s tugging him along as best she knows how, trying to keep him from falling over the edge, but it’s the blind leading the blind, the desperate leading the desperate. She doesn’t know if she’s making things worse or better.

She leans over, leans down and kisses the corner of his mouth. She feels his fingers clench around the amulet, her hand still resting over his wrist, and he turns his head just slightly.

For a second they hang there and Ruby doesn’t know what to do.

She’s a demon. She can’t love.

Then Sam surges up and presses his lips to hers -- kisses her for the first time, shoulders arched off of the bed and breath held. They’ve never done this before. This has never been a part of what they are.

It’s something too close, too emotional. This is more than animal sex. This is...intimate.

And suddenly Ruby is hungry for it.

Her mouth laps at his, tastes him wet and warm and he tips his chin back as much as he can. Her hand slips down from his wrists and grasps his chin again, holds him there. His arms shift and move over her, wrapping around her awkwardly but there isn’t a part of this that’s easy. It’s like trying to breath life back into an atrophied limb, like trying to rub blood back where it hasn’t been in so long, all of those emotions left too long dead and it pricks like pain, like pins and needles as Sam tries to bring it back. Tries to bring her back.

She wants to wrench away, wants to run from this, but he’s like gravity, something that pulls on her, indelible, undeniable. He tastes too beautiful and fragile and the demon in her wants to break him, wants to see the glory of him wrecked and ragged, but there is some other part, some part she had given up centuries ago, some part that he saw and spoke to -- a part that wants to be beside him forever.

Or for as long as he’ll let her.

The sex is good, it always is, but it’s not rough. She wants to think it’s because he’s hurt, because she can’t risk hurting her meal ticket beyond repair, but the truth tickles at the back of the skull that isn’t hers and she thinks there’s only so long she can ignore it.

She brings him into her body and writhes with him to completion, sex feeling hot and good but too close. Her eyes flood black, out of her control, and she looks down at him and he-- he doesn’t look away. He looks up at her, watches her, and he isn’t afraid. He doesn’t hate her. He presses his bound hands to her back, seeing her a monster and keeping her anyway. It burns and curls like holy water and yet different. It hurts but peels back, reveals something raw. Cleanses just a fleck, just a tiny piece of all the darkness she carries but she comes gasping, that tendril the first touch of life she’s felt in five hundred years.

She came to him with the belief that he could save her. It’s the first time she’s thought it might actually happen.

In the aftermath she lays on his chest, listens to him pant, listens to the patter of his racing heart. He shifts his arms to free her but she doesn’t move away. She rubs her hands against the side of his chest, feeling the hills and furrows of his ribs, the stretch of his too thin skin. She can’t lose him.

“...I did mean it,” he says, minutes later, his voice so low, so quiet in the darkness. She shifts them over, her onto the bed and him sprawled across her. She pushes herself up to sit, wrapping her arms around his body and he lays over her lap, his manacled hands cast out across the bed, the twisted coil of the amulet’s cord only half visible through the rumpled sheets.

“Hmm?” she asks, lowering her head to breath the scent of him in, her nose buried in the curls of his chestnut hair. It’s soft but there are flecks of dried blood in it -- probably from a blow to the head. She’s careful when she cards her fingers through the strands.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a demon or not, Ruby. It only matters what you do.” His voice is soft but scratchy -- tired. He still speaks with that conviction, though, that belief in what is right. It’s what makes her certain that it’s right to follow him, to listen to him. That he can guide her toward redemption. 

“You--...don’t give up, okay?” he continues. “I--...I need you not to give up. I can’t--”

“Then you too,” she interrupts, silencing him. “If it doesn’t matter if I’m a demon or not, it doesn’t matter if you have demon blood or not. It’s what we do, Sam.”

She tightens her arms a little, not enough to hurt but enough to hold, feeling the uneven surface of his back under her touch. He seems so big and broad but feels so weak. He feels like something too close to breaking and Dean would know what to do. Ruby can only feel her way amongst these human emotions that she lost so long ago. 

Guesses in the dark.

He makes a sound, non-committal and neither here nor there, something she can’t read, not doubting her but still doubting himself. She doesn’t know the right things to do, the right things to say but he leans into her despite that. He needs her. Then again, she needs him. And most days, that scares her.

“You should rest,” she says, the sound of a dust storm coming in outside. “I’ll patch you up later.”

She knows he doesn’t believe her. He carries his own guilt around while absolving everyone else, firm in the belief that there is something fundamentally flawed in him and just as firm in the belief that others can be saved. She wonders if Dean could have convinced Sam of something better if he were here, but she’s not sure. Either way, he’s not here now. He’s not here now and Sam only has Ruby to depend on. She’s far from ideal but she stays anyway, her body draped over his beaten one, serving as some meager protection, giving what little she has.

She made a promise, after all. _Two_ promises, but only one was a lie.

She’d promised Sam that she would save his brother, knowing all along that she never could.

But she’d promised Dean she would look after Sam, and that, at least, she is determined to keep.


End file.
